Method Community

I understand the difference between a customer and a contact - but in trying to implement Method Im running into a problem. 

Here is the scenario.  Customer Acme Manufacturing has 50+ contacts in offices around the country.  Each contact is stored in Method as a contact under the customer Acme Manufacturing.  The main contact under Acme at their head office is their controller who pays the bills - her name is Paula Payables.    One of the contacts from Acme in a satellite office - Bob Buyer calls and requests a quote for a potential project.  Our employee Susy Salesperson creates an estimate in Method.

1) How do we send the estimate to Bob Buyer - not Paula Payables

2) How do we associate that estimate with Bob Buyer so that we know who to follow up with.

It seems like a simple thing - but I can't see how to link the estimate to the correct contact - not the main customer contact.

Thanks in advance

Dave

Hello Dave,

Here's my asnwer. According to your situation if you are dealing regularly with multiple contacts for a customer and you want to deal with each contact separately, then you should use job of a customer field by using the job of customer drop down under the additional information section on the new/edit customer screen. 

According to your scenario, you mentioned that customer is Acme Manufacturing and you have multiple contacts for that customer. Let's say Paula payable and Bob buyer are contacts and you want to deal with them separately. So, the best course of action would be to add paula payable and bob buyer as a new customer with all deytails like email, contact info, phone etc. and under additional information section select the customer Acme Manufacturing and save it. This wil create the sub customer for that parent customer. With that you will be able to deal with those contacts separately without any confusion. You can add as many job as you want. 

Go back to the Customer and Contacts List and look at the newly added job of customer.  It should look like this:

Contact
Job of Customer: Customer Name

In my example my new records look like:

Acme Manufacturing
Acme Manufacturing: Paula payable

Acme Manufacturing
Acme Manufacturing: Bob buyer

My example is simple but you can see how all these jobs relate to one customer, the name before the : denotes who this job is for.  Each job is a separate contact record and can have a different email, phone, invoice, estimates etc.  They are linked simply by the job of customer drop down.

You can now create estimate for Bob Buyer and it is supereasy to follow up with him and it won't go to Paula payables or any other contacts.

Hope this helps!

-Inder